The deposit checks are in the mail but the college buzz is buzzier than ever. Having survived the arduous college admissions process, our seniors are now taking full advantage of their opportunities to negotiate the social landcape of their newly selected school well before they land on campus in late August. They are so much [...]
I hadn’t thought about it till today, but our summer reading list is a snooze. A dinosaur. A relic of a time when reading lists looked like, well, reading lists. Today, two things woke me up. 1. Finished with her AP exam, Sierra asked me for a book recommendation. I excitedly booktalked Libba Bray’s The [...]
I am a big fan of the unconference/edcamp movements and of open space planning. And though I’ve personally been lucky to attend a number of local, regional, and national edcamps and unconfs, I’ve wanted to share my excitement about these participant-driven events with my TL colleagues in Pennsylvania. Our traditional PSLA state conference is pretty darn [...]
Frankly, our password sheet has always been a royal pain. I’ve long been in search of an authentication solution–a relatively barrier-free strategy for out-of-school database access. For Mackin customers, MackinVia creates a single hub for e-books and database content–a one-user ID and password to your database collection (and your MackinVia ebooks) accessible from any internet-connected [...]
It’s time to bust open the OPAC. In fact, it’s long past time. My notion of collection development and of cataloging were a little different back in the day. I now consider digital resources–OER, images, videos, audio files, slideshows, documents, ebooks, maps, art, student work, data sets, interactivities, simulations, and especially the elements of the [...]
To celebrate its 5th anniversary the Classroom 2.0 Community (with the help of additional educational networks), recently released the community-sourced Classroom 2.0 The Book. Inspired by and led by community founder, Steve Hargadon, with Richard Byrne (Free Technology for Teachers) and Chris Dawson (ZDNet Education), the project’s official deadline for submissions was today, April 21st. In [...]
A few questions continue to keep me up at night. Among them: How can I get my students and teachers to discover and use our e-resources to the max? What does face-out shelving look like in an e-collection? We are fortunate, I know it, to have a wonderful collection of subscription databases and e-books. We [...]
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is one of those projects a librarian (and perhaps any other geeky type) dreams of. We’ve been blessed over recent years with access to the resources of so many powerful digital archives. But until now, these efforts existed as silos. We’ve had no infrastructure to aggregate these wonderful [...]
iGoogle retires on November 1st and folks who currently rely on it as a dashboard are shopping around for an alternate, cloud-based, personal launch solution. How can you replace those convenient gadgets, feeds, easily accessible bookmarks, useful tools, and pretty backgrounds? Here are a few of the options for us and for our students. A [...]
My friend Hornberger and I are having a conversation about nonfiction ebooks. In a recent post I chatted about my students’ eager acceptance of the EBSCO e-Book Academic Collection. Karen, the librarian at Palisades High School, as well as our PSLA Tech Committee co-chair and blogger, decided to test drive the database herself. She also [...]
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